Temenos means sacred site, ritual precinct. Temenos
(1998), is a searingly beautiful invocation of the persistence of place,
that has the power to inscribe contemporary political and social
circumstances with the memories of the past, and to transform the
landscape itself.
Nina Danino visited sites of apparitions of the Virgin Mary including
Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorge in Croat occupied Bosnia where the Virgin
is still said to be appearing. She films the landscapes that have
witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a sense of
the sacred. They appear remote and mysterious, somehow occupying a place
between heaven and earth. In the first section of the film the screen
glimmers with a silver glow, as if the viewer is also witnessing an
apparition. The viewers' eyes scour the screen for visible evidence of
the divine, but what they are given is the magic and holiness of the space
itself.
The landscape, with its intricate detail of twig and grass blade, links
the specific thing to its universal form. The place is both local and
unlocateable since the viewers are never told where they are. The viewer
is taken on a journey, where they experience the raw exposure of emotion
and haunting voices that penetrate the soundtrack. It is composed of
extraordinary performances by operatic soprano, Catherine Bott, and voice
performers, Sainkho Namchylak and Shelley Hirsch, who provide pastoral
voices calling in the landscape, bitter weeping, gentle humming, unearthly
sounds, sounds of nature, the scream of dementia and angelic arias.
Black and white 35mm film gives way to colour video footage of the city
waking. A cacophony of media noises contrast strongly to the luminous
photography of the sacred places, reminding us that a vision is a
temporary experience, but simultaneously, permanent state within. It is
this fleeting emotional state that the film grasps at and strives to
represent. Like the land itself, the film embodies the ineffable and the
transcendental but remains material and temporal.
The camera pans in circular movements giving a feeling of unworldly
weightlessness. The memoirs of the Marian visionaries, Conchita Gonzalez,
Bernadette Soubrious and the Medgorgjian children are spoken by the
filmmaker over the now empty landscapes. Their words are particularly
poignant in the case of Medgorgjia, the meeting point of Islam with
Orthodox and Catholic Christianity and the scene of atrocities during the
Bosnian war.
At the end of the film, Danino again draws from the work of Pasolini,
this time, the final scene from The Gospel According to St Matthew
(1964). After his Resurrection, Christ walks on the Sea of Galilee
towards his disciples in a small fishing boat. The disciples are
incredulous, but then realise that it is not contradictory that in a world
where they need to fish, they can also witness the divine. Marxist
filmmaker, Pasolini, imbues the Christian narrative with a social message
of the dignity of working people that reveals the transcendental within a
secular world. Like Pasolini's fishermen, the viewer has to live in the
real world, but in this film for an illusionary period, the can visit the
Temenos and know its frightening and beautiful secrets.
